The reviews on Steam have been 80% positive. Isn’t that good?
The negative reviews like “the game is dead” and so on are always met with a counter argument, albeit by the same 2 or 3 usual offended devotees. Maybe the negative reviewers should say “small and declining player base” instead of “dead game” to be perfectly accurate, but I believe they are trying to caution buyers that they may not want to spend the $40 till things improve. That seems legit.
The reviews are one thing … Steam Community is a whole 'nother beast.
They are 100% there to be a word that would get me banned from this forum. 
I’ve been a forum/comments moderator for over a decade (not said as a qualifier, just to set the scene), and I’ve seen that kind of weird falsity of intent (sorry not taken my meds, brain werdzing bad) a fair old bit …
The reviews, though, are, as you say … not necessarily fully containing all the facts or more genuinely just less aware of how the game is played. It doesn’t need 5000 competing per plot. 
Stormy foggy weather that wont go away unless you have a clear weather totem/tool turns me off… Having weather optional would turn me on lol
i used to be optional was real anoyed when it disapeared one day
I want to be able to apply permissions from one beacon to another. We are changing sovereign planets and it is a pain in the behind to have to go through and click all of the buttons for each of my wife’s characters, my son’s characters and my characters.
You can use the guild book permissions to achieve that :
The only thing that turns me off from it nowadays is the very long lack of updates, especially since “it’s coming soon” has been promised for about half a year.
Also the lack of communication and engagement from the devs since larian took over.
So… pretty much the biggest thing that generally kills abandoned games like this is what turns me off from playing it.
For me its the lack of care by the development team.
No responses via the support@turbulenz.com email address for months.
Don’t even bother DM’ing a dev either. They will read and ignore them.
You know, I’ve thought about putting a long rant here, detailed elaborations on this and that…
But I feel, and I think this says it all: Nothing I say here is going to make a bit of difference.
Still have all the respect in the world for the work that went into this game, apologies to dev team for various annoyances I may have caused, and FOREVER grateful I found this game, for the healing it gave me and the chance to meet and befriend some of you all. 
But after just putting a few more fuels on worlds this morning - and I was really trying to get into another building project I mentioned elsewhere - I just started feeling extremely soured. This might be it for fueling the worlds and keeping things going, barring a turnaround here. Not sure, might stick with it for a bit for the relaxation it provides, but very turned off at this point, and my gut feeling is, this is probably a relief to them. Guessing they feel the same. And as I said elsewhere, don’t want to feel my happiness is coming at the expense of others’.
Well, sorry for the rant, but this is the thread for that, so I said it.
This is no way to run a business
Actually I agree with you on this. I recently decided to move on. It’s feels like a dying game at the moment. For me that is. After couple years of playing only this game I am starting to feel they are just letting the game die on its own. The lack of communication and updates just turns me off. So I probably won’t be back this time round. Unless they start actually give the attention this game deserves. Better marketing and updates… better shop. Better skins. Ect ect. There’s my rant. This is only my feelings
I can relate To that. Mainly what bugs me more than no updates is communication. Its been said way too many times In this thread. Ive been playing games that had update cycle of 1 update in half of year… But At least People knew how it is. All the “hiding” and not saying things how they are just dont cut it For me… Sure i understand that you cannot say something but i dont understand why you have to keep People hope up. If i wouldve started this game this year… I would be long gone. The sad thing is that ive been here many years… So i know how they treated the game in EA example.
I honestly think there will be a revival, but we just have to stick by whilst a bit of overhead is spared for that other project.
Also, I think it’s kind of awesome that they were even asked.
Anyway … my UGH … is people that are competitive in a game that is essentially without competition, and they then game that, and it becomes a little bit … Trolly?
Like … sure … I know that you can stop people building up to your “settlement” (let’s face it, most of us just have lovely builds that happen to have high ratings - I mean, I don’t [#tinybuild], but y’all do) but I have literally had conversations where the person said their goal is to get a high ranking, and adjoin to similarly highly ranked settlements to become co-wardens.
Like … I know this is eminently preventable, but it just kinda hurts my brain that it’s the goal … because it will almost definitely result in huge builds dwarfing potentially modest local ones that might have been happy out in the wilderness without skyscrapers on the horizon.
For once it makes me thankful for the potato draw distance I’m currently rockin’ 
Similarly, when I get ‘told’ that I I have to build large, or with certain types of blocks, otherwise why am I even bothering.
Look, mate … I just wanna build the nice things that I wanna build … to about 30% completion or whatever the current day’s ADHD will allow.
Makes perfect sense to me. It’s the downside to putting in an achievement (at least on Steam, I don’t know about PS4) to become a Viceroy. It’s the game practically telling players that “This is a cool and worthwhile thing to do, you should do it.”
It’s not a turn-off for me as such, but it is an interesting choice. Achievements in most (obviously not all) of the games I’ve played tend to be things that any casual player can manage by playing the game in a normal manner, not grinding or competing for them.
It’s one thing for one to ask someone if they don’t mind one building up to their settlement and doing that (they might’ve not realised about the plot protection) …
But it’s another to completely just get up in someone’s grill with one’s overbearing build.
Luckily it’s not been much of an issue for me … but I guess I need to put up signs that say “RACK OFF, TOADY!” to get the message across that I wish to build in peace.
I mean, come on, you know the disingenuousity that I’m talking about.
Like, I’m facing an ocean, if someone builds up to me ON the ocean, knowing I have plot protection … they’re basically just being a tool.
It REALLY grates on my gills. 
I am a new player, have been playing for a couple of weeks now. I am really enjoying the game, and just wanted to provide some feedback from a player with a fresh perspective.
On the good side, I love the building system. It is just complicated enough to be fun, and not so complicated as to be overwhelming and intimidating. The ability to chisel the blocks into particular shapes is great, and allows all sorts of creative ideas to be implemented. Even in the short time I have been playing, I have already built a nice little house with a sloped roof and tray ceilings. I’m very happy with the building system.
I also am really enjoying the crafting system. It has an internal consistency that makes crafting pretty intuitive, but is not plug and play like a lot of games have. There are not any wasted steps with the crafting where you make a bunch of the same useless item just for XP to get to the next crafting tier. Everything in the system seems to retain its usefulness, and can be sold for at least some profit. I really like that the early level items like glue and cloth, etc, retain their value.
I find mining fun and relaxing, although there was a point in the leveling where transitioning from the early ores to silver and gold got pretty painful. Mining on a tier 4 with an iron hammer was not so much fun. Once I obtained some silver and the friend I am playing with forged in some aoe, it got much better, and now I am mining away. I realize now that we could have just purchased the initial silver we needed, but at the time we had not stumbled across a hub that had functioning portals, or found a shop with much for sale. New players may go a while before they stumble onto one of the live hubs or an active store, so there is just that little bit of a pain point early on.
This leads to the couple of things that bug me. First, the leveling system is a little wonky. Leveling up to level 20 was great. I could switch which activities I was doing and have a lot of fun rotating through mining, gathering, building, crafting and hunting. Once I hit 20, though, I hit a wall where I was locked into picking ONE of those activities if I wanted to go anywhere other than a tier 1 or 2 planet. As I had already picked up everything I needed from tier 1 or 2 planets, I wanted to move on the tier 3 and 4 to continue progressing. I therefore needed to specialize. This is where my issue comes in. When specializing on a single activity, there is not enough content in any particular activity to be fun for more than a couple of hours. Gathering the same 3 or 4 plants is only fun for a few hours. Mining is only fun for a couple of hours. Building is only fun for a couple hours, and there isn’t really any way to make coins off it, so you would be broke specializing in building in a couple of hours as well. Hunting the 5 total mobs in the game gets boring after a couple of hours. Crafting gets tedious and expensive after a couple of hours. As long as you can rotate through the activities, the game has a fun loop. Mine, refine, harvest, craft, build. Repeat. It is relaxing and enjoyable. The second you get locked into one of the activities, however, it becomes boring and rather unpleasant.
I wanted to return to doing multiple activities as soon as possible, so I read the forums, watched youtube videos on the game, and browsed the internet looking for the fastest way to level past this obstacle. What I found is that everyone uses alts so they can continue to do all, or at least several, of the activities in a rotation. I feel like this “specialization” aspect of the game is fundamentally broken. If everyone just makes multiple characters as a workaround, no one is truly specializing anyways. I don’t particularly want to have a bunch of characters. I lose stuff when I have multiple characters. I end up forgetting to put foods or tools on the characters I need them on because I just did that on another character and am misremembering which one. I warp somewhere and realize I’m on the wrong toon for the activity I have planned. I end up with all my coins on one character, and another completely broke because I sold everything on the other one. Generally the character that has items to sell, and the character that needs to buy stuff is not the same one. I have to switch characters constantly, and then the game bugs out on returning to the sanctum and I have to reboot the whole game. Not to mention, when you are first starting out, leveling multiple characters to 20 over and over again is not really a great user experience. It is faster to level the second and third time, but it isn’t as fun. There is a bunch of stuff you haven’t seen yet, and you are stuck doing the things you already saw over and over again.
I don’t really feel this forced specialization really serves a purpose, either. There is too much to do in the game to actually do everything, anyways. I am never going to do ALL the crafting lines. I will pick a couple I like, the friend I am playing with will pick a couple he likes, and we will buy the rest of the things from other players, and sell the stuff we make or gather/mine for coins. I cannot mine up enough items, and harvest up enough items to pursue all crafting lines simultaneously. I cannot really even harvest up enough, and mine up enough, and hunt up enough to support even 2 or 3 lines of crafting. I buy the extra mats I need, and sell my excess ores and plants, so the economy is still being utilized, even when I can do several things at once with alts. Why can I not do several things on a single character?
And I know, I know, eventually you can have several skill pages and will be able to switch what you are doing. But that only happens after you have a single character to 50. Waiting to do more than one activity for 30 levels of doing the same one does not sound like fun. 30 levels worth of killing cuttletrunks and harvesting beans would be horrible. 30 levels of whacking blocks with a hammer sounds not much better. 30 levels of building or crafting sounds impossible, because where would I get the resources to do that? I am a noob, I have no coins. Right now, I am leveling 3 characters to 50 so I can rotate through the mining, gathering, building, and crafting for the fun loop I like. After that, I will probably add the skill sheets, and get rid of 2 of the characters. But why do I need to do that? That just feels wrong.
In short, TLDR, I feel like the forced specialization is a hindrance to enjoying the game.
There are a couple of other things that I think need improving. The surface of all the planets is pretty much the same. The same mobs, the same plants, the same everything. There really isn’t anything distinguishing one planet from another other than colors and ores. 5 mobs does not feel like enough to keep hunting interesting. Meteor fights are a change of pace, but they are the same mobs you fight normally, so it is just a faster paced fight. It would be great if there were 15-20 mobs in the game, that varied by planet type, (lush, metal, coal) that gave you a reason for visiting a variety of planet types. It would provide more motivation for varying the planets you visit, and make hunting less tedious.
There is a little bit of variety in the plants that can be found on different planets, but not much. I think bitter beans only spawn on chill worlds, and spicy beans only spawn on desert ones? But you are essentially just searching for the same stuff on all the worlds again, and it makes the surface of the planets feel very samey. More types of plants would be great for breaking up monotony as well.
The only other thing I that bugs me is that there seems to be an awful lot more bright colors than natural building colors. I don’t really want my builds to look like disco ■■■■■. It is awesome that these brighter colors are in the game, and I’m impressed by many people’s ability to make them look pretty. For me personally, however, a greater variety of more neutral colors would be great. Beige, cream, ivory, a wider variety of grey and brown.
Anyways, that is just the opinion of a new player. I’m sure my opinions will evolve as I get more time in the game, so maybe some of this is just growing pains.
That’s a very good post. It was interesting to read your perspective.
For info, in case you don’t know, you can use the knowledge tab to find items for sale on the planet you’re currently on e.g. searching for ‘silver ore’ will bring up the knowledge page for this and on that page will be a tab marked ‘buy from’ or one marked ‘sell to’.
There’s an external app called B.U.T.T. which shows prices over the entire universe. I don’t have the link, but you can probably find it by searching the forum.
Fantastic feedback regarding the new player experience. I hope the devs take notes.
Some resources I think you might enjoy based on your post:
B.U.T.T. - Price search
Boundless Crafting - Worlds search, good for finding colors of homeworlds
Boundless Info - Item color search, good for finding sovereign world colors (if you’re up for hunting down the world)
Edit: Meant to respond to the other guy. Oops.
I love this game, really I do. I get caught up doing a lot of non-gaming stuff, and don’t have a lot of time for games right now.
The main issue for me, is I can’t get friends to come and play. I’ve had one jump in and I guess it never stuck because he stayed for maybe a week or two.
Today I logged back in and found the nearby portal hub abandoned and all but reclaimed. I don’t have much in the way of neighbours. I now have a small building and a road to nowhere. I’m left questioning if refueling my beacon was even wise.
I know change is a big part of the game. It’s hard to want to jump back in when you come back to isolation.
If i want to make a possible pattern… but its not possible because no matter how i twist and turn, that block does not want to rotate to the same position it is on another spot.
I really love the game. But i remember that i had a lot of trouble rotating blocks because i love intricate patterns. I am trying to recreate a pattern i made a year ago. Its not possible. I tried for 1 hour. just one adjacent block further it was possible.
Therefore. As i see it… there must be a connection between 2x2 patterns. which is not obvious to me. but when i want to put that into a 4x4 pattern everything just explodes… (not literally… )
I hate wood. i hate stone. i just hate about this point to the core of my being. And i do think that was the sole reason i left last time as well. though not because of wood but because of stone. I ran around the world wondering why some spots had a block rotated a certain way… and the truth was… because for some unknown reason… only in those specific spots the block could not be rotated right. which i dont get… at all. If i have decorative lustrous wood it should be able to do a star pattern if its able to do a star pattern. the corners should be able to be in any corner… if the corners are able to be in any corner.
.> Any OCD or obsessive mind… which are not rare among gamers… want it clearly structured. If the block is able to be that way… why not at that spot? As u can see… the thought spinning is endless.
Like i said i personally love the game. But thats why i came back to this post.